Abstract

In the postmodern condition, when values, norms, meanings grow uncertain and lose their ground, when morality, politics, family, and many other social institutions inherited from the so-called modernity cease to serve us one by one, community itself becomes problematic. On what basis can it be erected? God, humanity, bnature - everything has become suspect. Perhaps only one possibility remains at our disposal: to take the very lack of consistency as a basis for community. Postmodern philosophy attempts this. It seeks a third path between myth and nihilism, that is, between traditional unitary community and the absence of community. This way is claimed to be found in the community undoing itself, or, better, in the very undoing of community. The absence of myth (as well as a community based on it) is thought, contrary to nihilism, not as lack and nothing. The very rejection of myth is a work - if I can use the word here - of community. The impossibility of immanence and closed up identity is supposed to be a basis for an understanding of community that obviates the abysses of both totalitarianism and nihilism. To put it simply, the impossibility of the One, of the Absolute leads immediately to multiplicity and thus to irreducible community.

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